Page 1 of 3 Missile madness targets the money
By Julian Delasantellis
I never remember my son looking up from his bowl of Cheerios with soy milk to
ask me, "What did you do in the Great Cold War, Daddy?"; the little fellow was
always so militantly vegan that I always used to think he was sizing me for
reporting to the United Nations war crimes commission in The Hague every time I
poured ketchup on a steak.
And a lot of others, even those who never saw me throw a live lobster into a
pot of boiling water, probably felt the same way.
You see, I spent about the first decade-and-a-half of my postgraduate school
career in the rather unique professional vocation as a nuclear war planner and
strategist. I didn't personally fly B-52s or push buttons on submarines, but I
used to wield one of those mighty mean nuclear war-damage circular
sliderules, courtesy of the Rand Corporation.
Yes, I was one of Fred Kaplan of Slate Magazine's "Wizards of Armageddon",
"thinking the unthinkable" as Herman Kahn advised us, regarding Albert
Wohlstetter's (future father-in-law of Iraq War hawk Richard Perle) "delicate
balance of terror".
Nowadays, if you see someone identified on a cable TV shout fest as a civilian
"nuclear strategist" or "military strategist", you can pretty reliably believe
that the fellow is attacking an issue from the right, as in who is being
proposed to be bombed, and how savagely. But it wasn't like that way back then.
Most of us (about 99%) were firmly men of the left, feeling that we were on the
side of the angels due to our never-ending struggles with old-fashioned senior
military officers like the one who, during a debate on civil and missile
defense, once proudly proclaimed, "If there's only one couple left on Earth
[following a nuclear war], I want that couple to be American."
But I come not now to praise my former profession. Following US President
Barack Obama's decision to scrap plans for an anti-missile missile system in
the Czech Republic and Poland last week, I come to bury it.
What a happy pleasant land America was in the 1950s. Over in suburbia, dad
sexually harassed secretaries at work and barbecued hamburgers on the grill
when he came home, while mom was kept content through the her daily dance with
Prince Valium.
But shadows stained the blue horizon. The US Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs Board
of Education ruling meant that soon white America would have to deal
with the issue of its minority population bursting out of its urban ghettoes;
the 1957 launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite meant that fears would
soon be raised of thermonuclear warheads, instead of just errant fowl balls,
falling down onto the potato salad.
The feeling was that, if the Russians could put a small radio satellite into
orbit to circle the Earth, they could use the same missile/boost technology to
put a big nuclear weapon in space to then re-enter the atmosphere and detonate
over an American city.
It's not like there had been no Russian nuclear threat before Sputnik. Prior to
the late 1950s, Soviet nuclear weapons were supposed to be delivered to their
targets in the bomb bays of the propeller-driven Tu-95 "Bear" bombers, or the
not much faster jet-propelled Tu-16 "Bisons".
America's intention was to deal with the bombers in much the same way that
Britain dealt with the Luftwaffe during World War II, through constructing a
line of radar-directed fighter squadrons (the so called "DEW", or distant early
warning line) across northern America and Canada. Supplanted by surface-to-air
missiles, it was thought that this defense had at least a better than even
chance to knock down a good proportion of the attacking fleet. Few people were
so rude as to notice the difference in damage that could be done to US cities
by the 20% of a nuclear-armed bomber force that got through those defenses
compared with what was done to London by the 20% of the conventionally armed
Luftwaffe that got through its defenses.
But the nature of a nuclear-tipped missile made it virtually impossible that
even 5% of their attacking force could be intercepted. With a ballistic missile
total flight time of about 35 minutes from one side of the planet to another,
re-entering and approaching its target at a speed of about 40,000 kilometers
per hour, there just wasn't enough time to construct a system that could
identify a launch then direct a defensive missile towards something screaming
towards Earth at the speed of the attackers.
Also, the attackers could make the defenders' job even more dicey by shielding
the incoming warhead behind a screen of radar-deflecting "decoys" or even other
warheads, so that the radar directing the intercepting missile to its target
could not differentiate these from the actual threat.
It was at this moment that theorists like my professors chimed in with a
revolutionary idea, a redefinition of the concept of defense to take note of
the new, nuclear age. If America could not defend against the Soviet threat,
that is, there was no way to stop it, it could deter it. If, after a Russian
first strike, many US missiles and nuclear assets still survived, such as those
on hidden submarines, these could then be launched to devastate the USSR even
after the US had first been devastated - and the Russians would never launch
that first strike: there would be no point in it. It was peace at the price of
eternal vulnerability, but it was peace.
Nonsense, said the military and its civilian mouthpieces. The very concept of a
national security problem not amenable to a technological fix was an American
heresy in and of itself. Back to the drawing boards the engineers went,
producing America's first, and probably last, so-called anti-ballistic missile
(ABM) system, the Safeguard system.
Composed of two separate ABM missiles, the longer-range Spartan and the
shorter-range Sprint, with accompanying battle management radar and computers,
Safeguard was designed not to protect US cities, but US offensive ballistic
missile fields in the northern plains. This, in and of itself, was an
acceptance of deterrence's main tenet; that it was more important to have a
survivable second strike than to be able to shoot down enough of an attacking
missile force to make a difference to the country just trying to survive
underneath the missile battery.
But the system was riotously expensive, and, when both the USSR and the US went
from missiles carrying just one warhead to those carrying up to 20, the
so-called "multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles" (MIRV) , the
rationale for ground-based ABM systems seemed to evaporate. The attacker could
always add another MIRV, at a lot cheaper cost, than Safeguard could send up
another missile.
President Richard Nixon and Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev negotiated away
their ABM systems in 1972, first limiting themselves to two, then one, national
ABM site. The United States site, at Grand Forks North Dakota, was switched on
for about four months before being switched off in a cost-cutting move in 1976.
The Russian site, outside Moscow, with 100 A-135 interceptor missiles, survives
to this day.
A professor once told my class how to defeat the 100-missile Moscow ABM system.
Just send in 101 missiles. Even if the system handled the first 100, it would
be defenseless against number 101. Far from defending Moscow, the Russian
system only sets the city up for a nuclear walloping so intense that even the
sand will dance.
So, was it here, with Nixon's two 1972 nuclear arms reduction treaties (the
other was the SALT 1 treaty limiting offensive systems), that the world, and
particularly US conservatives, finally accepted the iron, terrifying logic of
mutual vulnerability, what came to be called mutually assured destruction, or
MAD?
No way. They had to lie low for a while, but soon they were back with a madness
of their own, a fever of the brain finally extinguished by Obama with his
decision last week.
On March 25, 1983, Reagan addressed the nation on television. After fairly long
boilerplate calling for "Congressional liberals" to stop resisting his calls
for higher defense spending, Reagan inserted at the end of his speech,
supposedly without the approval of his military and civilian advisers, the
language that has dominated US foreign policy, and much of international
relations in the 26 years since.
Let me share with you a vision of the
future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the
awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. Let us turn to
the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and
that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.
What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did
not rest upon the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack;
that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they
reached our own soil or that of our allies?
I know this is a formidable technical task, one that may not be accomplished
before the end of this century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of
sophistication where it is reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take
years, probably decades, of effort on many fronts. There will be failures and
setbacks just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. But isn't worth
every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We
know it is!
Proceeding boldly with these new technologies, we can significantly reduce any
incentive that the Soviet Union may have to threaten attack against the United
States or its allies ... I call upon the scientific community in our country,
those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause
of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear
weapons impotent and obsolete.
Tonight, consistent with our obligations under the ABM Treaty and recognizing
the need for closer consultation with our allies, I am taking an important
first step. I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a
long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate
goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles. This could
pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the weapons themselves. We
seek neither military superiority nor political advantage. Our only purpose -
one all people share - is to search for ways to reduce the danger of nuclear
war.
The next day, visions of battles in space between armed
laser stations filled the little heads of the press. Welcome to the world of
"Star Wars."
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